Eleven: Twelve

The first movie Eduardo Fierro ever saw was Apocolypse Now at a drive-in in the back of his father’s car in Caracas, Venezuela. “I fell asleep after the helicopter scene,” he remembers, “but I’ll never forget that intro. I still hear the music.”

When he was 12 years old, his mother gave him a Holga point-and-shoot and told him that if he ever needed to get more film printed to just go to the lobby store and give the cashier the family’s apartment number. After the first week he’d gotten two dozen 35 × 36−mm rolls double-printed! “She almost killed me,” Fierro laughs.

After attending the prestigious Macrisca Film School in Caracas, Fierro moved to the U.S., where he attended Full Sail University. He later worked as a Steadicam operator in Miami’s booming Latin music video and commercial industry.

Eleven: Twelve, directed by Juan Barros, tells the story about a guilt-ridden man who, after a tragic accident that results in the death of his wife, returns to the same city to reconcile his loss. Shot on a Canon 5D Mark II and a 7D (for slow-motion scenes) because of their affordability and small size, Eleven:Twelve was filmed in four nights in Lisbon, Portugal.

“Shooting there pushed my creativity in such a good way,” Fierro recalls. “But working all nights was challenging. By the end I think we were all hallucinating.”

They used existing source lighting and a few 500-watt and 1K China Balls, all the while pushing the Canon sensors to 3200 ISO (and once to 6400 ISO). Fierro also had the Flat Technicolor firmware, which, he adds, “helped a lot.”